GOP Civil War

Movement-conservative icon, author, and direct-market pioneer Richard Viguerie threw down the gauntlet to establishment Republicans and the GOP leadership Tuesday, charging that conservatives “have been betrayed, abandoned by our leaders, and that includes Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, Eric Cantor, Kevin McCarthy, [and] Reince Priebus at the Republican National Committee.”

Viguerie and other grass-roots conservative leaders are warning that Republicans who voted to end the shutdown on terms favorable to President Barack Obama and the Democrats will face major primary opposition in 2014.

“It’s a civil war in the GOP,” Viguerie declared Saturday in The New York Times.

Asked in an exclusive Newsmax interview Tuesday whether Republicans who went along with ending the shutdown will face a political bloodbath, Viguerie replied: “Oh, absolutely. It’s a war that’s been going on for 101 years, but limited-government conservatives have not been fully engaged. But now they are engaged.”

Viguerie had no hesitation in naming who will be challenged, either.

“We need to primary every single one of these big-government Republicans,” he said, “including Lamar Alexander, Mitch McConnell, [and] Thad Cochran down in Mississippi is being challenged.

RINO hunt! This is astonishing, and can only be driven by an ideological mindset so impervious to reality that it would rather destroy political conservatism’s chances of actually running the country than succumb to the least impurity in the ranks. The movement types really do believe that the GOP lost because it was stabbed in the back by its own people at Versailles on Capitol Hill. The GOP tribalism is devolving into a Lord’s Resistance Army conservatism, after the fanatical Ugandan cultists who believe that shea butter and their confidence in God makes them impervious to bullets.

The thing about this dynamic is that the purer the activists make the GOP, the weaker the party becomes, and thus the less likely to achieve policy goals. Which just drives the forces of purgation harder. Ted Cruz rules the Jacobin Republicans now, but he should remember what happened to Robespierre.

MORE FROM THIS AUTHOR

Hide 161 comments

161 Responses to GOP Civil War

How likely is it that a heavily-armed contingent of reality-resistant apocalypse-craving talk-radio-charlatan-led paranoid rage-a-holics might be turn murderous in a crisis situation?

They won’t be calmed down and they are not going away.
Now the conversation turns to betrayal…
Something none of us have ever seen before has taken root. If you haven’t looked into the psychology
of the right-wing authoritarian personality type, start here:

This compulsion to political suicide is insane. It gains conservatives nothing, other than the disgust and disdain of the American people. Remember them? Those pesky voters whose job it is to elect people to represent them…and they are not going to elect people who have no desire whatever to listen to anything they say. I honestly do not understand this.

Another amazing conversation at TAC. It is a shame readers can’t reply to each others’ comments.

To Aegis, welching on impossible promises is less dishonorable than foisting the burden on unborn generations.

I find it curious how those advocating endless debasement of our currency, effectively open boarders, and humanitarian military strikes until all the world’s meanies are dead or reformed are the level-headed ones. Thank you MSM! You have turned all our institutions away from their one original purpose: the preservation of American freedom in America.

In 1976 the Democratic candidate was the first born-again Christian ever to be a serious candidate for president, and besides that, he was a southern governor (not a federal congress member), while the Republican incumbent of two years was a northern former congress critter.

Now, look at the map in 1964, 1968, 1972, 1980…

Then Clinton and Gore broke it up for a little while… TWO southerners on the ticket, both nominally Southern Baptists, one a former pro-life congressman from Tennessee, the other a multi-term sotuhern governor… Details friend Young, the devil is always in the details.

Re: This is, of course, well after the supposed ‘Southern Strategy’ was hatched.

After Watergate briefly drove the GOP into a ditch, and in fact just a very few years after the Southern strategy was hatched– it really didn’t get under way until after the 1968 election when George Wallace’s strength in old Dixie gave GOP strategists notions about where the votes were and how to get them.
And surely you are not denying the historical fact that the South went from being solidly Democrat to solidily Republican, except around the edges.

Agree about the national ID card. As long as something like that is kept very minimalist– name, photo, expiration date, a serial number for the card (not the bearer) that could be used for online verification, and indication of citizenship. The card should not become a one-stop shop for ID thieves. And yes, m_young, that could be made quite secure (especially with the online verification option: look up the serial number and view an image of the card) without need for biometric data, RFID chips or other police state features.

So what you are saying, Siarlys, is that it was the Democrats who employed a Southern Strategy. That fits perfectly with their keeping their segregationist Senators in place. In fact, we only see Dems starting to win in places like New England when the nominated two guys from the former confederacy–one mentored by a segregationist senator, the other the son of one.

Oh, and 1980 — a Republican blow out year? The results by congressional district show that Carter retained huge support in the south, just about the only place (outside of Minnesota).

The electoral maps show a clearly growing rural/urban divide, even in formerly mostly Democratic places like rural Iowa. Out West there was the ‘Sage Brush Rebellion’ pitted against an increasingly NIMBY-ish coastal environmental movement. (In 2000, I believe it was, Feinstein ran ads heavily touting her ‘desert protection act’, which had the effect of giving coastal ‘environmentalists’ a warm fuzzy while not having to, you know, actually give up anything important to them. She and they are still at it.)*

There was the ‘Sun Belt Strategy’ where ‘Club for Growth’ type Republicans thought that the growing exodus from the Rust Belt to the South and Southwest would provide them with the opportunity to convert former union guys to ‘right to work’ zealots. Funny thing happened to that last strategy — by acquiescing to and even promoting in the case of ‘Dubya’ and McCain, open borders the GOP helped stop that flow. Guys that might have left their old mill towns for jobs working construction in California found that it didn’t pay and, since 1992 or so, that such jobs where monopolized by Mexican ethnic networks. It was a two-fer for the Democrats , it helped keep a core population in place and dependent in the industrial mid-West, and it brought in a new population that votes Democratic in the Southwest. (And always has, look at the counties in the lower Rio Grande valley, solidly Democratic even in 1980 and 1984.)

Nobody seriously believes that George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, Bob Dole, Jack Kemp, Newt Gingrich, etc had any connection to segregation or its legacy.

BTW, in looking at the old election maps, I found this..
===
In “Chain Reaction,” a remarkably candid and insightful account of the Democrats’ steady decline, Thomas B. Edsall, a political reporter for The Washington Post, with his wife, Mary D. Edsall, focuses on two major groups. The first includes members of the party’s reform wing, the well-educated, often intolerant George McGovern activists, who gained control of the Presidential nominating process in the early 1970′s — and powerfully influence it today. Far more liberal than the traditional Democratic voter on virtually every issue, these people, according to the Edsalls, have alienated core Democratic constituencies (including the culturally conservative white working class); squelched a desperately needed debate on the issues of black poverty, joblessness, family structure and welfare dependency (by labeling opposing views as racist); and repeatedly forced their national candidates into the suicidal position of defending minority rights against majority values. Scorning political compromise, dead certain of their mission, they seem impervious to the lessons of defeat.
====

You could probably change less than 20 words of that paragraph and have the ‘diagnosis’ of the Republicans. Of course, now much of those folks who were the Radicals that Edsall blamed for the Dems situation have completed their long march through the institutions. They control the Narrative.

*It would be lovely to preserve more of the desert. But as the Wilderness Society points out, the Mohave is squeezed in between two growing urban areas, Los Angeles and Las Vegas. The thing is, those areas are growing so fast because of international immigration (migrants themselves and their progeny). But of course the Left–now including the environmental movement — is now fully aboard with open borders.

If they’d stick to basic human rights they have a chance: consider the cavilier way that people are being treated like cannon-fodder for the battle over the fake free-market exchanges, with no consumer protection law in the nation for redress: “The calculation of subsidies continues to fail tests, and it’s pretty clear that some actual consumers have made actual purchases with bad information, which will become apparent to them when they get their first bills. If the interface problems are addressed and the volume of purchases increases, this calculation problem could become a huge concern. “ Yuval Levin

__
* $12 million SEC fine to Knight for irritating their well-heeled Wall St. clients with a fay’s worth of error-prone back-office market-making software that basically bankrupted the firm overnight (as they hemoraged >$100,000/sec. on the wrong side of the trade of high frequency-traded penny stock-shorts and other hedged financial instruments) Who’s got the back off the rights of these consumers on the “wrong side of the trade” of the IRS rebate-discount data-base malfunction? The GOP worries about their corporate peers, but who in worries about the rank and file? Its a sad and sorry day – get the lawyers on it, write a new Consumer Protection Law for the period of the Obamacare malfuntion (leave definition as wide as possible, to basically make all the sales of insurance revokable if the client can get a better deal later offline when they’re not victims of hi-pressure timeshare-type sales tactics!!!!!